Recently I have been getting back into tape and have been fairly unimpressed with the sound quality overall of a few releases. I got a few Mgla tapes and to me the sound quality is pretty poor.

Dodsengel's Imperator on the other hand sounds fantastic on tape though so it's got nothing to do with my deck. Can you guys recommend any other bands or albums where the tape version sounds really good?

Dub tapes are mostly dependent upon who did the dubbing. A lot of tape labels actually don't seem to give a shit about sending out tapes that sound awful.

The worst offenders are the ones that don't know how to use the gain knob on their tape decks, and the ones that use mono tape duplicators that were designed for speeches._________________Taphephobia Productions

You should also consider investing in a QUALITY cassette deck. I used to listen to my tape collection on a shitty/cheap cassette player for years. Then I got a better cassette deck (a Tascam 202 mk IV), and I found the difference remarkable in how much better my tapes sounded all of a sudden... also, having a pitch control on your tape deck is the shit!_________________One day I raise my hate, and chrush this glass Kindgom. One day I gather shards, and create the new Order.

As someone who actually runs a tape label and is currently spending a shitload of money to upgrade equipment just so everyone can shut up let me tell some secrets.

1. Most tapes sound like shit because the master I'll get will be a shitty mp3, or burned onto a CD-r. If it's burned onto a CD-r it is never separated by side etc and they shove as many as they can fit on there. If you copy directly from the CD each time (so you don't have to make a tape master of your entire stock) usually you have to take the master they give you rip it to your PC (which almost always causes errors to occur in the audio even if you rip as WAV's) or just go and download it from a blogsite when you get one you can't use.

No WAV on Data DVD-r or CD-r = less chances of actually getting a good sound.

Some/probably most labels may differ in their process (which is fine) however I always just copy from the CD each time I make one for a customer.

Analog tape masters are great unless somebody decided to put multiple releases onto the same side.....

2. Most tape versions of albums are sourced from CD rip's (so you have scuff on disc it affects the audio) because asking the band for their actually high quality master (if it exists) usually results in them having to do work, they might flake and say no. Hence your tape version of album isn't a free release and might not happen.

3. Masters in uncompressed sound formats usually don't exist for demos made by children who are more excited that something actually got recorded then if it sounds good. This is further compounded by most of them being clueless on how to mix anything or what compressing the audio does. It gets worse if they aren't using a windows PC... Many demo bands stay demo bands because there is simply no brain function in the skull cavity.

4. Good tapes/equipment is expensive. A worthwhile and mandatory investment it may be, but getting decks with the ability to copy to tapes beyond type I is expensive. Plus sites like tape.com don't exist in every country.

Home duplication generally sucks and is a hassle. Many people have been/should shift to pro production but that generally requires more money. While there are endless amounts of recordings made with all the heart in the world, how much money gets invested into production is a business decision.

Some labels are getting smarter and just making a small limited tape of their full-lengths for the retards out there that want to listen to stuff only on odd formats to be weird/to get people to stop asking to do tapes of it anyway.

In short, tapes are not a perfect science. Getting the best possible output requires effort, money, hard work and knowledge of the production process. As the black metal underground demonstrates daily (while there are many examples of great people who are the opposite of this) effort, money, hard work and knowledge of the production process are not commonplace.

To be honest, I've had my music pro-pressed on tape by three different factories, each with their own professional equipment, etc... and each time, the sound on the tapes came out as different from the .WAV master I sent them (when they didn't cut the beginning of a song or something...)

I mostly have problems with people who don't know how to dub tapes. I recently received a batch of tapes who were dubbed so low that I have to turn my amp's volume up to 5 to hear anything at all. 1 is usually enough to make the windows from my house shake... I don't mind small fuck-ups or crude sound much but having to do this also adds lots of extra tape hiss and makes the listening session rather unpleasant.

Besides that, I'll still keep buying tapes because I love them and they're the format I listen to the most.

You should also consider investing in a QUALITY cassette deck. I used to listen to my tape collection on a shitty/cheap cassette player for years. Then I got a better cassette deck (a Tascam 202 mk IV), and I found the difference remarkable in how much better my tapes sounded all of a sudden... also, having a pitch control on your tape deck is the shit!

agree with this, just got a quality tape deck in my car and it sounds 100 x better than the old one i've got at home, restored my faith in the lowly cassette!

The problem with many tape labels is they actually don't care about quality of dub. Must be understood by everyone, that person responsible for quality of dub is distributor dubbing the tape, not label which printed covers. Some people ask if my copies of some releases from other labels sounds good or bad. All dubbed here sounds great because i dub it here, from the other hand sometimes my releases comes from other labels with shitty dub or even without stickers prepared for them. Those things all obvious for some people, for other are surprising. Labels don't have at home 50.000 ready tapes just waiting to be sent
So to write once. Important is who dub the tape, not who officially released the tape. Oriana, Maltkross or other from me sounds great, from some shitty distributor may sound like shit as well, if they use some kind of 5 usd cd/tape combo mobile for dubbing